John Kasich REALLY should stop promising to turn Ohio into Florida

John Kasich has a Florida fetish.? In just about every standard stump speech, Kasich talks about how great the State of Florida is compared to Ohio.? He loves it so much, his wife is starting to wonder if he secretly wishes he was married to it, instead.

I have no idea what in Kasich’s psychosis fuels this obsession with Florida.

Kasich also loves to talk about how many jobs have been lost in Ohio while Ted Strickland has been Governor, but the reality is that Florida has actually lost over twice as many as Ohio has during the same period.

Then, there’s the whole “Florida’s state budget was more susceptible to wild revenue swings from the recession due to the lack of an income tax thing.”

And now, according to a report from the Associated Press, the Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy predicts that many of those jobs are unlikely to ever return.

What’s worse? Yeah, Florida’s job situation would have been much worse without Obama’s stimulus package:

Even if Florida employment grows at the previous record rate of about 210,000 jobs per year, it would take nearly five years to restore the jobs that have been lost since March 2007.

”It is in my opinion that we will not reach that rate of job growth,” said John Hall, executive director of the policy group. He noted that the number of lost jobs in Florida would have been greater without the stimulus dollars provided by the Obama administration. ”Recovery from the current downturn is likely to be slow and difficult.”

Florida is already suffering from the worst unemployment in its history. The state’s 12.2 percent rate in February was the highest since it began keeping count 40 years ago. It represents more than 1.1 million looking for work.

…

[The effort by Republican legislators trying both balance the budget without raising taxes and find a way to create new jobs] “is complicated by a tax structure dependent on growth and a job market with an inordinate number of low-paying jobs, many of those in the service sector.”

This is John Kasich’s “New Day, New Way” for Ohio: a state on the verge of fiscal bankruptcy dependent on a predominately low-wage labor market.